A third of the world's population has given money to charity in the past month, the largest study ever carried out into global social conscience reveals today.

The "World Giving Index" used Gallup surveys of 195,000 people in 153 nations and asked people whether they had volunteered or given money or help in the last month. It also asked respondents to rank how happy they are with life.

It found that a fifth of the world's population had volunteered, almost a third had given money to charity, and 45% had been "good samaritans" and helped a stranger.

The UK came eighth on the index overall and finished joint third, alongside Thailand, in terms of giving money, with 73% of the population having donated to charity. However Australia, New Zealand and the United States were far more charitable overall. In Europe, only Switzerland and Holland fared better than Britain.

Rich countries dominated the top positions – yet around half of the top 20 places were taken up developing nations including as Guinea, Guyana and Turkmenistan. Strikingly, India ranked at 134 and China at 147 – with Chinese people among the least likely on the planet to volunteer. Only 4% said they had done.

"What this shows is that in countries with a well established culture of giving supported by tax breaks and regulation, people will give more," said Richard Harrison, director of research at the Charities Aid Foundation, a charity which promotes giving and which produced the report. "There are some factors like in the US where there is a limited welfare state there is a feeling charity steps in but we think the survey establishes the need for a framework for giving."

"I think with China we know that when Unicef asked ordinary people, 'Why give to charity?' the response was 'Yes, why give?' This plus the fact the Communist party has only just allowed charities to begin to flourish means that in such a nation we do not see a culture of giving."

The report also said that happier countries were likely to be bigger givers than those who were simply wealthy, which Andrew Oswald, professor of behavioural science at Warwick Business School, said confirmed the results of "small-scale laboratory experiments which have shown that when people are asked to spend money on others they feel happier than people who are asked to spend money on themselves. This goes against conventional economic wisdom, and indeed human intuition, that says that spending money on ourselves will make us happier."